Registry to Clear Up Marine-Life Classification Confusion

The underwater world and the underworld have at least one thing in common — lots of aliases.

The Census of Marine Life, an effort to catalog all species of life in the oceans, has validated 122,500 species names so far, as well as 56,400 aliases, different names that have been applied to the same species over the years.

"Convincing warnings about declining fish and other marine species must rest on a valid census," Mark Costello of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, said in a statement.

"This project will improve information vital to researchers investigating fisheries, invasive species, threatened species and marine ecosystem functioning, as well as to educators," the scientist said. "It will eliminate the misinterpretation of names, confusion over Latin spellings, redundancies and a host of other problems that sow confusion and slow scientific progress."

Modern scientific naming was introduced in the 1750s by Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus in an effort to organize the list of living things.

The idea was good, but over the years different scientists "discovered" and named what turned out to be the same thing, resulting in more than one scientific name for several species.

Halichondria panicea — the breadcrumb sponge — is the champ so far, having been given 56 names in the scientific literature since it was first named in 1766, according to researchers compiling the census.